Grade inflation may be less dramatic than recent reports have shown, and its causes are too complex to be easily remedied by any one policy, Provost Peter Lange will report to the Board of Trustees' Academic Affairs committee Friday.
Lange said that in preparing for the report over the past spring and summer, he developed models showing that at least half of the increase in grades over the last few years has been due to causes other than "inflation," such as an increase in the quality of students at Duke and the nature of the curriculum preceding Curriculum 2000.
"We found there were significant phases of increases in grades and periods of flattening," Lange said. "We've gone about six years with grades more or less flat."
He said it is too soon to tell whether Curriculum 2000 will have a dampening effect on grades.
The study looked at grade point average by academic division, but did not compare grades across the individual departments.
Matching national trends, humanities students have the highest GPAs, followed by social science students and then those in natural sciences and engineering.
"While there are differences in grading by divisions, they are very, very long-standing," Lange said. "The differences haven't changed over long periods of time."
John Simon, George B. Geller Professor of chemistry and chair of the Academic Priorities Committee, said the APC heard Lange's review and discussed grade inflation.
"It's a less contentious issue than I thought," Simon said. "We started with the discussion of grades at Duke and grades around the country--whether grade inflation was a real thing or a fictitious thing."
Lange said the old curriculum might have allowed students to take more classes in which they feel at ease, allowing them better chances to achieve higher grades.
In that curriculum, which now applies only to the Class of 2003, students take three courses in four areas, two courses in a fifth area and can eschew classes in a sixth--allowing a math-averse student, for example, to skip out on quantitative reasoning. By contrast, Curriculum 2000 mandates foreign language, math and science classes.
Valen Johnson, a professor of statistics currently on leave at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said the curriculum could have an effect on grades, but took issue with the notion that better students would lead to higher grades, even as trends show the average Duke student's high school GPA and SAT score are rising.
"In my opinion, attributing grade inflation to better students reflects a misunderstanding of the purpose for assigning grades," he wrote in an e-mail. "If, in fact, Duke is now able to attract better students than it has in the past, then the appropriate response from the faculty should be to raise standards. After all, a Duke A should not be equated to an A awarded at a community college, and community colleges should not be prohibited from assigning As simply because they attract less-able students."
Peter Feaver, associate professor of political science and recipient of the 2001 Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, said over his 12-year teaching career, he has noticed an increase in grades in two perspectives.
"Students who are not performing well in my class, if I discover that on their transcripts they are performing well in other classes, it makes me wonder if an A is still an A," he said. "But my grades have been creeping up as well. I'm sure I'm not as tough a grader as I was my first year."
Lange said it would be difficult to change grading with a top-down administrative policy.
"Grading is an individual faculty decision," he said. "And you'll notice at Harvard, for instance, where all of this came out, they didn't change any grading policies at all."
Last year, reports showed 91 percent of Harvard University undergraduates were receiving honors at graduation--by contrast, only 35 percent of Duke's Class of 2002 received honors.
"My guess is we will do something in one or another faculty settings," Lange said. "It will be more on the informational side than a policy."
In 1997, Johnson proposed an Achievement Index, a computer program that would have ranked a student's performance in the context of the performance of others in the class and noted the class average alongside the student's grade. The policy was eventually defeated by the Arts and Sciences Council.
"The solutions strike me as raising other problems, even while solving this one," Feaver said.
Simon said he saw no need for a new policy right now, but hoped Lange's information would be disseminated among faculty members.
"I think you can live with it right now," he said. "It's certainly not a crisis or anything like that."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.